And Yet another Day in the Life of…

Seriously, my life is one walking disaster after another. Let me explain.

Last week, I took a few days off, just because I could, and decided to spend my time painting my living room. This was not a task that I had wanted to take on myself because I knew it would take FOREVER to paint. But seeing that the only way it would ever get done, I decided to bite the bullet and just paint it myself. This actually turned out not to be as bad as I thought. I discovered a wonder thing…the power roller. I tried to rent one without success, but when I discovered that I could purchase one for $40, I made one of the greatest purchases EVER!!! I got the whole top half and the first coat of the bottom half painted in the first day with out incident. Day two was another story. Though they were the same brand and sheen, the red paint I was using on the bottom half was a lot runnier than the tan was. As I was beginning my second coat on Tuesday morning, some paint dripped between the tarp and the wall, so I laid the roller down on the tarp and ran to get a rag. When I returned, I discovered that paint had built up on the splatter shield and had run off the splatter shield AND off of the tarp and onto my carpet. I now have two big red spots in front of my fire place. When I tried to clean them up with Goof-Off, the spot turned out bigger and pink! So now I am faced with either purchasing a rug or possibly replacing my living room floors sooner than planned (yes, I know that a rug would be cheaper, but I’ve come across a really good deal on flooring, so if I can find what I want, I might just go ahead and replace the floor totally.)

By the way, I’ll try to post pictures of the “almost” completed room soon.

Okay, so fast forward to Sunday. We were having a class cookout Sunday night after church. I had gone to Sam’s bought everything we needed. I even had a system down for Sunday. There were only a few things I needed to do before that evening: 1) cut lettuce, tomato, and onion; 2) make ice cream; 3) meet Chad at the church to load ice chest, pop, and charcoal supplies in his car; 4) load my car.

I had the whole thing timed out. 2:00, cut lettuce, tomato, and onion. 2:45, start making ice cream. Ice cream is supposed to take 20-40 minutes to make. I was allotting myself an hour plus a few minutes to spare. Meet Chad at the church at 4:30 to load ice chest. Leave church a little early and run by the house to get the rest of the stuff for the cookout.

Things were going well. I got a head start on cutting the L-T-O. I saved the onion for last because I hate cutting onion. I was making my last cut into the onion when I sliced my finger open on a knife. Hind site, I should have gone and gotten stitches, but that would have messed up my schedule, so I just cleaned it really good and put a lot of pressure on it with a bandage. I still had another onion to cut, but I decided I was done with knives for the day.

Next I started the ice cream. This actually is so much easier than it seems. Yes, it takes more steps than just running to the grocery store, but it’s not hard and it tastes so much better. I had borrowed Suzy’s ice cream maker so that I would be able to make two batches. I mixed everything up, poured the contents into both of the containers, and started the mixers. As far as I could tell, things were going fine, except it was taking a lot longer than I expected. Good thing I allotted myself an hour! A little after 4:00, my ice cream freezer had finished, but Suzy’s was still going. Her ice cream maker has a clear top, so I look close and realize that her dasher is moving. For those of you asking, “What is a dasher?” It’s the paddle in the middle of an ice cream maker that makes the ice cream. The dasher isn’t supposed to move, only the can. The fact that both were moving was a bad sign! So I turned it off and took off the lid. The ice cream had hardened around the edge but was still liquid in the middle. When I went to try to remover the dasher, ice cream splashed up in my face and all over my clothes (btw – I was already dressed for the evening at this point). So I clean myself off really quick and hit panic mode. I now have 15 minutes before I’m supposed to be up at the church, I’m covered in ice cream and I’ve got a big problem on my hands. I run upstairs to change and attempt to call Chad. I have NO SERVICE on my phone (my neighborhood has horrible cell reception). So I knock on Melissa’s door and ask her to call Chad for me and tell him I’m running late.

I ran back downstairs and grab a hard plastic spatula and begin scrapping the sides. Meanwhile, my roommate comes in to see if she can help. I had her continue scraping while I ran to the church. When I get back from the church, Melissa has gotten all the ice cream scrapped and ready to be hardened – then she looks at me and asks “did your spatula have a big chunk out of it before you started this?” Oh, you guessed it, there is now a big plastic chunk of while spatula somewhere in the vanilla ice cream! Here is my dilemma – do I toss out the ice cream or just tell people to eat carefully? If you were at the cookout and ate from the last batch of ice cream, you know the answer – you had to eat carefully. To my knowledge, no one ever found the spatula.

You would think that would be the end of the evening’s mishaps, but nooooooo! Chad and I had a little miscommunication, and I beat him to the park instead of him beating me and getting the grill started. So we got a late start as it was on the coals. But to make matters worse, we couldn’t get the coals to ash over fast enough. I have learned a few things about cooking with charcoal, but we’ll save that for later. It took several douses of lighter fluid and my freaking a few people out to get the coals anywhere near hot enough to start cooking. Finally after 7:00, we start putting burgers on the grill. Basically we were cooking about 4 at a time and thawing the rest out at a rapid speed. I was feeling the stress and obviously someone else noticed because all of a sudden I hear someone behind me asking “so how is it going over here?” It was my new best friend, Dusty. He offered to do the “Church of Christ” thing and take over the grill because that’s the “man’s job”. (Don’t get mad at him ladies, he was joking). I gladly turned my spatula over and then we were cooking. He is my new hero because by this point I smelled like sour milk, lighter fluid, smoke, and sweat and I was DONE! They got a pretty good system down: Dusty sacrificed his eyeballs and did the grilling, his roommate cracked the jokes, Nicole kept the grill loaded with fresh burgers, Melissa was in charge of the tray of cooked burgers and I just delighted in the fact that I could finally relax some.

The rest of the evening went fine – well until this morning when I had a dream there was a ghost in my house and I woke up totally freaked out, but other than that – it’s all good now. And I’m glad I only do this cookout once a year!!!!